I watched Sixteen Tongues (1999), a pseudo-intellectual, cyberpunk porn sci-fi, twice and still didn’t understand it. OK, I get the porn part, but the rest is pseudo-intellectual bull pucky.

Here’s what I pieced together: In the future a cop, horribly damaged by an explosion, is patched back together using the tongues of 16 people. An understatement to say he looks…unusual. He also makes people (male and female) pleasure him orally, then shoots them in the head. At no point did he read them their rights.

He lives in a seedy hotel next door to two shaved ladies, one into men, the other not, but both into each other. One is a horny Asianassassin with a freak fetish, the other a techno-junkie, on the search for a killer.

The horny assassin visits tongue man next door and she pleasures him with her tongue. He thanks her by not shooting her in the head, but leaves an oil slick of blood all over her chest as a souvenir of their first romantic moment. What a gentleman.

From there I lost the narrative. Hardcore porn plays on the TV around the clock but it’s blurred just enough to get a NR-rating. (That stands for No Refund.) In the end, a pretentious indie film made by people who don’t even know themselves what the movie is about.

All these new horror movies coming out, and yet I get the nagging feeling I’ve seen ’em all before. Maybe I did in a previous life. Hey, that might make a good idea for a horror movie!

SHELLY (out now VOD / December 13, 2016 / DVD)
“An unholy force takes root in an expectant mother’s womb in this eerie, dread-inducing shocker. Privileged, nouveau-eco-hippies Louise and Kasper live off the grid in a remote home in the woods. Unable to conceive, the couple arranges for their immigrant maid, Elena, to act as a surrogate mother in exchange for payment. But as Elena becomes mysteriously sicker with each passing day, fears mount about what may be growing inside her.”

Sounds a bit like Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Looks like Rosemary’s Baby, too. That one didn’t have nouveau-eco-hippies, though. Shelly should get Elena a midwife familiar with the birthing techniques of evil. And on the day she pops, it might be nice to have black towels handy lest any evil leakings get on the rug. (That stuff is hard to get out of shag carpeting.)

CLAIRE IN MOTION (January 13, 2017)
“Three weeks after Claire’s husband has mysteriously disappeared, the police have ended their investigation and her son is beginning to grieve. The only person who hasn’t given up is Claire. Soon she discovers his troubling secrets, including an alluring yet manipulative graduate student with whom he had formed a close bond. As she digs deeper, Claire begins to lose her grip on how well she truly knew her husband and questions her own identity in the process.”

Spoiler: The reason Claire’s husband bailed is because this movie sounds boring. (He’s probably just getting in quality mattress time with some graduate student chick.)

PITCHFORK (January 13, 2017 / VOD)
“Having recently shared a life-changing secret with his family, Hunter recruits his friends to come with him from New York to the farm where he grew up as he faces his parents for the first time. As the college students enjoy the fresh air of Michigan farm country, an older, more dangerous secret slowly emerges. While Hunter navigates a new place within his conservative family, a vicious creature from their past descends on the farm, putting the unsuspecting city kids in mortal danger.”

So a guy comes out to his judgmental parents and they unleash a stab-y creature monster on him? As this is set on a farm, I’m speculatin’ out loud that the monster might actually be — are you ready for this — a cow. Makes total sense when you think about it.

An unexpected bonus to 2017: Kodoku is the sequel in name only to Yūdai Yamaguchi and Jun’ichi Yamamoto’s 2005 splatter classic, Meatball Machine. All the adjectives above don’t come close to describing the visual explosions therein. Heck, I even profiled MM on August 27, 2014 and put some really cool movie pics of all the cyberpunk sci-fi, fantasy, extreme gore, and comedy.